UPCOMING EVENTS

You can wait for the clients to come to you, or you can go to them. Menlo Park Realtor Catherine Marcus chose the later strategy. So now when Google employees look up their company’s stock’s price on Google — by punching ticker symbol GOOG into the search box — a text ad for Marcus appears prominently next to the search results. Marcus got the idea for the ad after being mentioned in an LA Times story this summer about Google’s IPO. That story prompted several soon-to-be-wealthy Google employees to call her about buying houses. “It occurred to me there are probably a lot more,” she told us today. Her Google ad (which costs her 10 cents a click) has been up about two months, and she said it’s helped corrall more Google employees as clients. Marcus, who calls herself “pretty technical,” has been doing search advertising for about a year. She’s also bought the keyword for Yahoo’s ticker symbol, YHOO, as well as more traditional real estate keywords. “This is a great way to get to people who are looking for something.”